TeaHouses

A TeaHouse is the team boundary in Coldtea.

It groups the people, task boards, teams, and connected services that should see the same shared work. Your local project still lives on your machine. A TeaHouse decides which Coldtea team surfaces you can use around that project.

What a TeaHouse owns

A TeaHouse can hold:

• Members and invitations.
• Teams and task boards.
• Workflow states, labels, and task activity.
• Connected services such as Linear or GitHub, where enabled.
• Matcha QA and other team settings, where configured.

Think of it as the place where shared context is scoped. If you are in the wrong TeaHouse, the task board, integration status, and team settings may all look wrong even when the local repo is fine.

Teams and boards

A TeaHouse can contain one or more teams. A task board belongs to a specific TeaHouse and team.

Coldtea remembers your last used board, but switching TeaHouse or team changes the shared task surface you are looking at. Use that switch when a task is missing before assuming sync failed.

Teams carry their own workflow states. That is why two teams in the same TeaHouse can have different columns or task flows.

Members and roles

Coldtea currently shows two TeaHouse roles:

• Owner — can invite people and revoke pending invitations.
• Member — can view members and use the TeaHouse surfaces they have access to.

Invites include an email address, a role, and the teams the person should join first. Pending invites can expire or be revoked.

Do not treat a Coldtea role as a replacement for every downstream permission. A person may be a TeaHouse member and still lack access to a GitHub repository, a Linear issue, or a private service used by the repo.

Integrations stay scoped

Integrations are connected from the TeaHouse settings area. The exact options depend on your build and workspace setup.

For connected tools:

• Coldtea needs the active TeaHouse to know which integration to use.
• The upstream provider still decides what the connected account or app can see.
• Local Git still uses the credentials and remotes configured on your machine.

If access looks wrong, check both sides: the Coldtea TeaHouse/team and the provider account or installation.

Local projects are still local

Joining a TeaHouse does not give teammates access to your filesystem. It gives access to shared Coldtea surfaces such as tasks, logs, plans, and integration-backed context, depending on the feature.

Keep private machine details out of shared task descriptions and logs unless your team has agreed that they belong there.

Next: team workflows or permissions.